Federal Government Selects SK&A to Measure EHR Adoption

SK&A, August 1, 2016

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), has once again selected SK&A as its partner for measuring the adoption of Electronic Health Records in physician offices, hospitals and other healthcare sites.

SK&A will deliver approximately 830,000 records to be used by the government to analyze the uptake of EHR and usage trends. The one-year project commenced July 15, 2016. SK&A had previously supported the ONC for similar research projects between 2011 and 2014.

“The ONC feels we are the data experts to deliver these insights,” said Michele Smith, SK&A’s senior consultant on the account. “They have a lot of faith in what we can do. They were very pleased with the pilot tests we did for them last year in preparation for this project.”

The ONC has the rights to use the data for analytics and surveying and to publish the results of its findings citing SK&A as the reference database supplier. The ONC will make use of full the set of profiles from SK&A’s master database, including medical offices, hospitals, nursing homes, and home healthcare providers.

“They particularly want to understand affiliations between these organizations and linkages to healthcare systems,” added Smith, who worked with the ONC for 10 months outlining the scope of the project. Smith teamed up with the ONC’s director of research and evaluation. New to this study is the exploration of adoption of EHR within nursing homes, a fertile market for technology vendors.